Chapter XXXI: A New Hilltop 224 (2)

Theodora’s prattle fairly bristled with Lary. Whatever his mother might think of him, in his little sister’s eyes he was the one flawless being. It was he who had supervised the furnishing of Vine Cottage, for a certain Professor Ferguson, a testy little Scot in charge of the department of biology at the college. And Lary and his mother had almost broken heads over some of the details.

Everything about the house was exquisite. Judith thought she knew what Lary would be like--the man who could limit himself to a single dull blue and yellow vase for the library mantel. The external appearance of the cottage had promised fustian ... the fish-scale ornament above the bay-window, the elaborate carvings between the veranda pillars, the somewhat fussy pergola that covered the gravel walk from the kitchen to the garage.

Bare vines were everywhere, swelling with sap and viridescent with eager buds that strove with their armour of winter scales, although it was not yet the end of March. Beds of narcissus and tulips gave promise of early bloom, and already the yellow and white crocus blossoms were starring the withered bluegrass of the front lawns. There was an unwritten law that the lattice which screened the vegetable garden must never carry anything but cypress and Japanese morning glories, and that potatoes must be planted east of the pergola. There were other unwritten “musts” that came to light, day by day, all of them having to do with the garden, over which apparently Mrs. Trench had retained control.

“But, Lordee, you don’t have to pay no attention to her,” Dutton sniffed, when a rather arbitrary ruling was undergoing vicarious transmission. “Treat her like Ferguson did, the fust time she butted in. It’s _your_ house.”

Between Dutton and Theodora, it would not be long until all the Trench skeletons had been dragged from their closets and set dancing in hilarious abandon, for the amusement of the new tenant. They were not real people, the Duttons and the Trenches, with their unfamiliar life-experience. She had never envisaged anyone like them. It was all a part of the dream she had cherished--a place she had never heard of, where she could lose herself ... and forget....

VII Lavinia Pays a Call

I

In the pigeonholes of her memory, Mrs. Ascott had stowed a collection of unanswered questions, neatly tabulated and reserved for possible solution. Why had her marriage with Raoul been the inevitable failure she knew it must be, almost from the beginning? Would they have found each other if there had been children? Would her own life have been more satisfactory, had her mother married for love and not for social position? And now she added another, trivial as compared with these, yet quite as elusive: Would Mrs. Trench have waited the prescribed two weeks for a first call on a new neighbour, had her small daughter failed to report the broken window--and other things?

Whatever the answer, the stubborn fact remained that Mrs. David Trench did call, on Friday afternoon. She left a correctly engraved card on the vestibule table, and sat erect on the edge of her chair. She wore an austere tailored suit, patent leather boots that called attention to the trim shape of her feet, and a flesh-tinted veil of fine silk net with flossy black dots. In the full light of the south window, she might have passed for thirty-six. Barring a conspicuous hardness of the mouth, her features were excellent. The hair that lay in palpably artificial curls along the line of her velvet hat was as black as it is possible for Caucasian hair to be, and the eyes were coldly piercing--as if appraisal were their chief function. But her speech.... Cloying sweetness trickled through her words, as she assured her tenant that they were destined to be friends. She would come and care for Mrs. Ascott if she should fall ill--so far from home and mother. She was a famous nurse. Dr. Schubert would bear her witness. Her heart ached as she thought how desolate must be the life of a young widow.

“Yet,” she added, “it is an enviable state, after all--when one has passed the first shock of grief. Like everything in life, it has its compensations. You don’t have to bother with a man, and there is no danger of your being an old maid.” She pronounced the last words as if she were referring to the plague or small-pox. “The West must look strange to you,” she hurried on, “a little town, too, after spending all your life in New York and the great cities of Europe.”

“I have spent very little time in New York,” her tenant corrected. “When I was married I went to Philadelphia to live--such time as we were not travelling. And I was scarcely away from Rochester until I was fifteen.”

“Rochester! You don’t tell me! We went to Rochester for shopping and the theatre, as people in Springdale go to St. Louis. What a little world it is, after all. Did you ever hear of a town called Bromfield?”

Judith searched her memory. At last she had it. She had driven to that village more than once with her grandfather, Dr. Holden. She recalled one visit, when the sleigh was insecurely anchored in front of a house on Main Street, while she curled up for a nap in the great fur robes on the seat. The horse, arriving at the mental state which demanded dinner, before the physician was ready to leave the house, had untied the hitching strap and cantered unconcernedly to the livery stable where he was in the habit of being fed.

“You don’t mean that you were the little girl in the sleigh!” Mrs. Trench’s eyes were scintillating with astonished interest. “I’ll show you the account of it--in the Bromfield Sentinel. I have a complete file of the little home paper. And it will surprise you to know that the man your grandfather was calling on was Robert Larimore, my father. He died of brain hemorrhage, that same night. All the Larimores go that way--suddenly. Dr. Holden was called, when my father’s mother died, but it was all over before the telegram reached him. And your grandmother ... she must have been the Mrs. Holden who did so much work among the poor.”

“Yes, my parents left Rochester to escape from her pets. That, of course, is only a family joke. My father spent a good many years in South America, and I was left with my grandparents. One of my brothers was born in Bolivia and the other in the Argentine. I didn’t see them until they were six and ten years old.”

Mrs. Trench was not listening. Should she ... or should she not? In the end, she did. “Mrs. Ascott, I know it sounds like a foolish question--a city the size of Rochester--but you said a moment ago that as a child you knew everybody. Did you ever hear of a family named Fournier?”

“The people who kept the delicatessen, around the corner from my grandfather’s private sanitarium? Yes, I knew them well.”

“Was there a daughter--Lettie or Arletta--some such name? She’d be a woman of about forty-five by this time, I should think.”

“No, she was the niece, a wild, highstrung girl who gave them a good deal of trouble. She ran away and was married, at sixteen--some worthless fellow from up-state, who afterward tried to get out of it.”

“Worthless?” Mrs. Trench bristled unaccountably.

“That was the way Lettie’s people regarded him. Their little boy and I played together, as children. My grandmother took a lively interest in Lettie, as she did in all wayward girls who found no sympathy at home. I remember she devoted a good deal of her time to the patching up of quarrels between Lettie and her husband--and keeping peace in the family, when he was in Rochester with them.”

“Was there anything--peculiar--about their marriage?”

“Lettie was romantic. I believe that was all. It happened before I was born; but I remember that there was always talk. Grandma Holden compelled her to confess her marriage, to save her good name. And the foolish part of it was that she and the youth were married under assumed names--”

“The boy--how old is he?”

“By a very amusing coincidence, I happen to know that, too. I couldn’t tell you the ages of my brothers, with any degree of certainty. But Fournier Stone and I were born the same night, in adjoining rooms of Dr. Holden’s sanitarium. He arrived early in the evening, and I a little before dawn. By that much I escaped the ‘April Fool’ that was so offensive to him. I shall be twenty-seven next Friday.”

Mrs. Trench made swift mental calculation, and her stiffly pursed lips uttered one inexplicable sentence:

“Thank God, my people have always been respectable.”

II

Lavinia went home, her whole being in turmoil. She had not seen Bromfield since the day when she and David packed their scant belongings and turned to seek oblivion or happiness in Olive Hill. With the exception of the Sentinel and her sister-in-law’s verbose letters, she knew little of the course of events in that quiet back-water that had environed her stagnant girlhood. And Ellen left large gaps in the village news, gaps that could be filled, inadequately, by inference or imagination. That Calvin had a child, this much she knew. That he had spent most of his time in Rochester, prior to his father’s long illness and death, this, too, had been conveyed to her by a random personal notice now and then. But that he and Lettie had gotten on badly--had quarreled.... Cruel joy burned in her eyes. They had had recourse to the neighbours, to smooth out their family affairs. Whatever unpleasantness she had had, within the four walls of her own home, none of the neighbours had been permitted to suspect that her life was not all she wished it to be. The neighbours. What kind of woman was Mrs. Stone, that she would.... But Lavinia knew, at last, what kind of woman Mrs. Stone was. She reflected that Lettie’s marriage certificate probably had not been framed in gold, as hers was, and conspicuously displayed on the wall of her bedroom. The past ten years, the Stones had prospered, and Calvin had succeeded his father as president of the bank. Ellen and Lettie were on calling terms. She would write Ellen....

In memory she went back to the days when Vine Cottage was new, when to her fell the task of choosing a line of social progress in the clique-ridden town of Springdale. She had three small children, ample excuse for a little dalliance. And the cottage, with two hundred feet of ground to be transformed into a marvellous garden, was a little way out--a double reason for delay, when David urged her to return the calls of the Eastern Star ladies, who had been most gracious. “I don’t want to make any mistake,” she told him. “If you once get in with the wrong set....” David didn’t know what she meant.

III

Society in Springdale, such society as counted for anything, was divided by a clearly marked line of cleavage, with Mrs. Henry Marksley dominating one stratum and Mrs. Thomas Henderson the other. The Hendersons were leaders in the intellectual life of the community and staunch pillars in the Presbyterian church. Lavinia was glad that David had been brought up a Presbyterian--or rather, that that happened to be the fashionable church in Springdale. When it came to matters of principle, it was not easy to manipulate David.

The Marksleys seldom went to church. On the other hand, Mr. Marksley stood ready with three contracts, before David had finished the work on the campus, contracts which enabled him to reap the benefit of his labour, instead of delivering two-thirds of the profits into the hand of the senior partner. Mrs. Marksley was particularly anxious to rally to her standard the best looking and aggressive young women of the town. She was trying to live down the latest escapades of her husband and her eldest daughter, Adelaide. Such a woman as Mrs. David Trench would be of service to her--and she could make the association correspondingly profitable. But at the psychological moment Mrs. Marksley went into temporary social exile, ceasing all activity until after the birth of a son. The hiatus, together with certain whispered stories concerning Adelaide, drove Lavinia to Mrs. Henderson and the Browning Club. It was a step she never regretted. Within a year she was able to send to the Bromfield Sentinel an account of a spirited business meeting, at which “young Mrs. Trench” had been elected secretary, over the heads of two rival candidates whose husbands were in the college faculty. Mrs. Henderson was perpetual president, and membership in the club gave just the right intellectual and cultural stamp.

Years afterward, Tom Henderson and Walter Marksley began an exciting race for Sylvia’s favour--courtship that came to nothing, as all Sylvia’s courtship did. And now, the boy whose advent had settled, once and for all, Mrs. Trench’s social destiny, was playing around with Eileen, taking her to and from school in his car and ruining her digestion with parfait and divinity. David and Larimore--to his mother he was always Larimore, never Lary--had set their faces stubbornly against this flattering attachment. There had been no scandal in the Marksley family in recent years, and no other objection that a sensible person could name. But how to persuade them.... Mrs. Ascott! To be sure. It was providential that she had come to Springdale at such an opportune time. She would see things in their true light--being a woman of the world. If only Larimore could be induced to call on her. She was--m-m-m, yes, nineteen months older than Larimore. That made it safe. A young widow.... But Larimore Trench had never been interested in any woman. She would trump up some reason for sending him over, that very evening. She must have Mrs. Ascott’s assistance. Eileen’s future--her own future, for reasons as yet but dimly apprehended--was at stake.

IV

But Theodora spared her the trouble. Judith was finishing her lonely dinner when the telephone rang. “I’m bringing my brother over to see you. I told him you wanted some changes made in the living-room.” In a muffled whisper she added: “Of course you didn’t; but I’ll explain. We’ll be there in a minute.” Before she could reply, the receiver had clicked into its hook, and the two were seen emerging from the house.

“Mrs. Ascott, this is Lary. It’s the lamp shade, the one on the newel post--you know--that’s the colour of ripe apricots.”

She darted from the vestibule into the wide living-room, from which a stairway ascended to the floor above, and turned on the light, although the day was not yet gone.

“You don’t like it?” Larimore Trench, asked. “This colour scheme, I know, is a bit personal.”

“Why, child, when did I say such a thing? I don’t recall discussing the lamp shade with you.”

“I didn’t exactly tell him you said that you objected to it. I said I _thought_ you did. You see, mamma told us at dinner that you agreed with her in everything. And she has always said that for this room the lamp shade must be rose pink.”

“I’m sorry to disagree with your mother, but I should not like rose pink.”

“Mrs. Ascott,” Lary began, his clear brown eyes mock-serious, “I must warn you that Miss Theodora Trench is a conscienceless little fibber. It isn’t her only fault, but it is her most serious one.”

“Lary! To think of _you_--giving me a black eye, right before Lady Judith! When I haven’t had a chance to make good with her. If mamma or Eileen.... But _you_!”

“I couldn’t make either of them any blacker than they already are, dearie. And I didn’t mean to humiliate you. But you mustn’t begin by fibbing to Mrs. Ascott.”

She hung her head, crimson blotches staining the sallow cheeks. After a moment she looked up, and the angry fire had been extinguished by shining tears.

“I guess it’s better this way. Now Lady Judith knows what kind of a family we are. You can’t get disappointed in people if you know the worst of them first.”

V

It transpired that within the Trench home the new tenant had already been established as “Lady Judith,” a name which Theodora afterward explained, with documentary and graphic evidence to substantiate her none too credible word. A long time ago Lary had given her a book of fairy tales, the heroine of which was Lady Judith Dinglewood--beloved of all the bold knights, but destined for the favour of the king’s son. Lary had adorned the title-page with a miniature of the beautiful lady, and had added a colophon showing her in the robes of a royal bride. Theodora could recite every word of the romantic tale before she was old enough to read. She had gone to sleep with that book in her arms, as Sylvia had insisted on taking her best wax doll to bed. The moment she espied the name, Judith Ascott, on the lease that Griffith Ramsay had signed, she decided that her Lady Judith had come true.

It mattered little that the new occupant of the name bore not the slightest resemblance to the two little water colour drawings. Lary could paint a new Lady Judith, now that he knew what she really looked like. It was not his fault that he had made the eyes black. He had to do that, to appease mamma and Sylvia--whose standards of beauty were rigidly fixed. But eyes that could be blue or grey, or flecked with brown, as they were this evening.... How much more interesting than eyes that were always the same colour! The hair, in that new picture which Lary must paint, would be pale chestnut, with golden glints where the light fell on it. And the mouth--the sweetest mouth! She told Lary about it as they went home, through the close dark of a wonderful spring night. Had he noticed Mrs. Ascott’s mouth? He had.

VIII Hal Marksley Intrudes

I

April brought a break in the stolid serenity of Elm Street. The big house across from the Trench property began to manifest signs of awakening life. For almost a year it had stood vacant, with only a caretaker to guard it against the depredations of Springdale’s budding youth. Paint and pruning shears had scarcely achieved the miracle of external transformation when a consignment of furniture arrived, via the Oriental express and San Francisco. This much Theodora discovered as she risked her fragile bones among the packing cases in the reception hall. She had contrived to make out four letters, N-I-M-S, in great smears of glossy black ink on several of the boxes. That hardly sounded like a name.

“Mamma says it will be time enough to find out about them when they move in,” she complained to Mrs. Ascott. “I heard her ask the agent--and she was mad as hops when he refused to tell her.”

“Delightfully mysterious, Theo. Perhaps some European monarch has grown tired of his crown, and is coming to live across the street from us.”

“Maybe it’s the Emperor of China. I saw the loveliest great red dragon--where one of the cases had broken open and the burlap was torn off. Oh--” in sudden fright, “don’t let Lary know I pried.”

She had perceived her brother’s approach, by some subtle sense that bound them. He and Eileen were crossing the lawn with noiseless steps and Theodora’s back was turned. When they reached the front gate, Mrs. Ascott gave greeting:

“What does one do in Springdale, these glorious spring evenings?”

“One goes to the show, if one has an amiable brother.” To Eileen’s suggestion, Larimore added: “Won’t you come along, Mrs. Ascott? Vaudeville and pictures--not much of an attraction; but it might amuse you. My mother is entertaining the ladies of the missionary society this evening, and she doesn’t want us around.”

“Yes,” Theodora added, “and Mrs. Stevens is coming. She and Eileen don’t speak, since the ‘ossified episode.’ You know, Lady Judith, that’s all that saved you from being invited to join the Self Culture Club. Mamma belongs. She was one of the charter members--reads the magazine, like it was the Bible--and she meant it for a compliment to offer your name for membership. But Mrs. Stevens was so furious at Eileen that she tabled all the names mamma submitted.”

“You wouldn’t have gone in for that rubbish anyway,” Eileen defended herself. “Mrs. Stevens makes me tired. She hasn’t a thing in her library but reference works. And mamma holds her up to Theo and me as a bright example. Tells us that we can’t expect to get culture unless we look things up. Ina Stevens does that, and she has facts hanging all over her. She’s as prissy as her mother.”

“But what was the ‘ossified episode’?” Judith asked, recognizing one of Larimore Trench’s expressions, wherewith Theodora’s speech was frequently adorned.

“Humph, I got caught on the word, in rhetoric class. Thought it meant something about kissing, and the whole class hooted at me. Ina was at home, sick, that day, and Theo and I went over in the evening to take her credit card. Her marks were loads better’n mine, and Mrs. Stevens swelled up so about it that I couldn’t help telling her that my grandfather was expected to die, because all his bones had ossified. And, Mrs. Ascott, both of them--Ina and her mother--fell for it. Mrs. Stevens said it was a dreadful disease, but she had known one old lady who lived three years in that condition. I looked blank as a grindstone; but Theo had to go and snigger. And after we went home, Mrs. Stevens looked it up--and ’phoned mamma that I had to apologize, or she wouldn’t let Ina chum with me any more. I don’t care. I like Kitten Henderson best, any way.”

She turned to look anxiously up the street, as if she were more than half expecting some one, while Judith went into the house to get her hat.

II

The performance had been going on for an hour when the four entered the theatre, groping their way down the dark aisle to a row of unoccupied seats at the left side. The stage was being set for a troupe of Japanese tumblers, and the interval was bridged by news films and an animated cartoon. To Judith this form of entertainment was new. Raoul could tolerate nothing but the sprightliest comedy. With the Ramsays and Herbert Faulkner she had tried to find surcease in grand opera and the symphony. Once in London she and her mother had taken refuge from the rain in a cinema theatre where, on a wide screen, a company of fat French women chased a terrified little man--who had loved not wisely but too often--through the familiar streets of the Latin Quarter, overturning flower stands and vegetable carts, falling in scrambled heaps that writhed with a brave showing of lingerie, untangling themselves and scampering to fresh disaster, when they discovered that the object of their jealous rage had somehow slipped unhurt from the mass. Mrs. Denslow was disgusted. Judith was only bored.

But this bit of screen craft was different. On an expanse of dazzling white a single black dot appeared, paused a breathless moment and went tripping about in a zigzag dance, spilling smaller dots as it went. These resolved themselves into figures that stalked about with the jerky motion of automata. A ghostly hand passed over the picture, and it stood revealed a plenum of regularly arranged dots. With another wave of the wraithlike hand, the dots began to move slowly to and fro, advancing and retreating until they assumed the outlines of a great picture, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Other pictures were produced by means of those same dots. But Mrs. Ascott, who had never before watched the vibrant changes of an animated cartoon, found it necessary to close her eyes to relieve the strain. And then ... some one was leaning over her shoulder, heavy with the odour of a spent cigar, and a full, authoritative voice was saying:

“Come on, Eileen. The whole bunch is down in front. Ina and Jimmy are there, and Kitten and Dan.”

“Hal Marksley, if you can’t come to the house for me--” the girl said petulantly, but she stepped to the seat of her chair and vaulted nimbly over the back. Theodora moved to the vacant place beside her. Lady Judith and the play went on.

III

At the gate, Lary kissed his little sister and sent her home, going into the house with Mrs. Ascott. There was no need of so much as a nod to assure him that the evening was not yet finished. She wanted to ask him about Dr. Schubert--the tragedy that had mellowed and sweetened him. But the revelation would come in due time. Instead, she demanded to know the significance of Indian Summer. Only that morning the old physician had remarked--when she told him of Dutton’s warning--“We hop from snow to sweat, out here in Illinois,”--that one could endure the heat if one kept constantly in mind that after frost there would be Indian Summer.

Indian Summer. She had read a sentimental essay, years ago.... April--the arrogant, reckless abundance of Youth. August--the passionate heat of Love. October--the killing frost of Sorrow. And after that, the golden peace of Indian Summer. In her part of the world there was no such division of seasons. Yet the figures had attached themselves to the walls of her memory by tenacious tentacles. For her there had been neither sorrow nor peace ... just the bald monotony of a life that had been regulated by the artificial standards of her mother or her husband. She was so deadly tired of it all. And her work at the laboratory had not proved absorbing. It was too easy ... the copying of formulæ and an occasional hand at an experiment that might be dangerous. But she knew that none of them would be dangerous. Dr. Schubert was too cautious to permit her even that zest. Sydney Schubert, the son, who specialized in diseases of children, she hardly knew. An epidemic of scarlet fever was raging in the mining towns of Sutton and Olive Hill, and he was away from home most of the time.

“In order to appreciate Syd, you must know the tragedy of his boyhood,” Lary began. “It was more terrible for his parents, of course. But to a sensitive boy who had an instinctive love of beauty--quite aside from his natural devotion to his mother.... Mrs. Schubert was without doubt the most beautiful woman either of us had ever seen. Not the type my mother admires. And it may not have been the kind that would last. She was too fair and exquisite.”

“And she died, while the bloom was still fresh?” Judith asked.

“No, she lived eight years. We never knew how the thing happened ... a breeze that ruffled her clothing too close to the grate, or it may have been that her veil caught fire from an exposed gas flame. She was dressed to go out, and was waiting for the doctor in the great hall of their house, when she discovered that her clothing was ablaze. She wrapped herself in a carriage robe that happened to be lying on the settle; but she was horribly burned. One side of her face was disfigured beyond recognition. Fortunately the eyes were saved. It was after her recovery that Dr. Schubert had the pipe organ installed in the hall, to occupy her time, for she never went out, and at home she always covered her scars with a veil of white chiffon. Syd and Bob and I took turns at pumping the organ for her, before the days of electric motors, and she taught all of us music. One afternoon, three years ago, they found her at the organ ... her head resting on the upper manual. They thought at first she was asleep.”

“I’m glad she went that way,” Judith said, her throat tight with emotion.

Lary might have resumed, but he was arrested by boisterous laughter, out on the street. Eileen and her friends were going by, and young Marksley was saying, with a good-natured sneer: “Cornell--nix on Cornell for mine. The kid and I have this college business all doped out. She’s going to cut this little Presbyterian joint, next fall, and we’re both going to Valparaiso University. Greatest college on earth! Place where they teach you to dissolve the insoluble, to transmute the immutable and unscrew the inscrutable. I’m going to take commercial law, and Eileen can go on with her music....” The voices died away, as the group turned the corner beyond Vine Cottage.

“I wish my sister wouldn’t--” Lary checked himself, colouring.

“I shouldn’t take it too seriously. Such school boy and girl affairs seldom come to anything. Eileen’s a stubborn child. I wouldn’t oppose her ... openly.”

IV

It proved a mistake, letting Eileen go away with Hal and the others. At midnight she tried to let herself in noiselessly at the side door, found it unaccountably locked, and was forced to ring the bell. There was a scene at the breakfast table, reported to Mrs. Ascott by Theodora, with dramatic touches. Scenes were not uncommon, but this one was different. It developed along unexpected lines. No one had taken into account the possibility of Mrs. Trench as a bulwark of defence for Eileen. But that wary ally was not wont to fight in the open. She was so accustomed to storming the postern gate, that she was likely to creep around to the rear of her objective, when the front portal stood open, undefended. This morning she had for subterfuge the highly practical business advantage of cultivating Hal Marksley’s friendship. Hal’s father, as the whole town knew, was preparing to build a palatial mansion in the parklike addition he had recently laid out, at the western limit of Springdale’s residential section. Six architects had been invited to compete for the plans. It was important that Larimore Trench be the victor. This would place the contract for construction automatically in David’s hands. But David and Lary wanted to eliminate themselves from the competition, and admonish Hal that it would be advisable for him to take his affection elsewhere. At this, Lavinia forgot her prudence--delivered a direct assault on her husband, which might have been but an echo of the thing she had been saying to him at regular intervals for twenty-eight years:

“Yes, and you’d insult Hal--spoil Eileen’s chance, _the way my father spoiled mine_--just because a young man has money and knows how to show a girl a good time! I don’t intend to go through another such experience as I had with Sylvia.”

The reference to Sylvia was beside the mark. She had not intended to betray her eagerness for an early marriage for her second daughter.

IX News From Bromfield

I

Lavinia was finding her tenant increasingly useful--the wicket gate an open sesame to many of the difficult problems for which she had been wont to search in vain the pages of the Self Culture Magazine. A development watched by her son with incredulous wonder. Hitherto Lavinia Trench had believed nothing that was conveyed to her by word of mouth. “She’s a pure visuel,” Dr. Schubert had sought to explain. “She gets her mental concepts through her eyes.” But Lary knew that that was not all of it. His mother held an enormous respect for the printed word. She wanted one of her sons to be a writer. That would reflect real credit on the family. Her own inability to form fluid sentences only increased her admiration for those unseen masters whose thoughts and experiences had received the accolade of printer’s ink. True, she had many times appeared over her own signature, in the clumsily edited columns of the Bromfield Sentinel--when there was a chance to weave into the story some reference to Larimore’s triumphs at Cornell, Sylvia’s social conquests or Bob’s athletic achievements. But to get things published ... and paid for.... This last comment always sent Lary flying from the room. She would probably not take any stock in the things he wrote, even if she read them in print. They were so at variance with all her established convictions.

On a certain Thursday morning she made occasion to call on Mrs. Ascott, the newly arrived copy of the Sentinel in her hand. Her dark sallow cheeks showed hectic splotches, and her eyes flared and dimmed with the emotion she was trying to conceal. She had not written the story on the front page of the Bromfield paper. Her fancy’s most ingenious flight could not have fabricated anything one half so ... gratifying. So terrible, she amended, to her own soul. But the real, the usually submerged Lavinia, knew that the former word was the right one.

“You remember the boy, Fournier Stone, that you used to play with when you were a little girl in Rochester,” she began tensely. “Read that.”

The story was told with all the crass vulgarity and offensiveness of small town journalism. The bank examiner had paid an unexpected visit to the Bromfield National bank--because of certain stories that had been circulated concerning young Stone’s extravagance in Rochester and Buffalo. It was found that a large gap between the bank’s records and the actual cash on hand had been bridged by spurious paper that implied the additional crime of forgery. This, it transpired, was not Fournier Stone’s first offence. In the past he had fled to his mother for assistance; but now Mrs. Stone was critically ill, and he had not dared to tell her of his dilemma.

“To think of a mother shielding her son in such rascality!” to which Lavinia added, with snapping satisfaction, “But what could you expect of such a mother?”

The account closed with the statement that Mrs. Stone had suffered a relapse, because of the shock of her son’s arrest, and for several hours her life was despaired of. The culprit was released, under heavy bond, and was constantly at his mother’s bedside.

II

Saturday brought a letter from Ellen Larimore, with further details. Fournier Stone had disappeared--walked out of the house, in the clothes of one of the servants, right past the secret service man who was there to trap him. It was thought that he had gone to Canada. His mother was in a desperate condition. “Of course,” Ellen added, “we don’t know a thing for certain. I talked to Calvin this morning, and the poor man is distracted. But most people here think he might have set the boy a better example. I never forgot the day you told me it was too risky to marry a man who drank and gambled. What if it was Larimore that was a fugitive from justice! Aren’t you thankful that you married David instead of Calvin? I’ve had an idea for a long time that you got wind of the affair with Lettie, and threw Calvin over, in a jealous huff. Now I see your wisdom. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you that when they came to look up Fournier’s records, in Rochester, it came out that he is six months older than we thought he was. There are a lot of things about Calvin Stone’s marriage that some of us older people would like to find out about.” Lavinia set her teeth hard, and a yellow pallor replaced the flush of indignant pleasure that had accompanied the reading of the letter ... up to this point. She had intended to show the letter to David; but when she came to the mention of her wisdom in the choice of a husband, she wavered. That last sentence brought her to an abrupt decision. She burned the letter--and repeated such parts of it as would fit in with a half formed plan in her own mind.

David was profoundly sorry for the Stones. Their misfortunes helped to ease the pain in his own heart, a pain that had never been lulled since the black day when Bob Trench’s dripping body was taken from the river. It was his mother who had urged him to compete for one more trophy at the annual college field meet. To David it seemed that his wife cared more for Bob’s ribbons and foolish little silver cups than for all Lary’s scholarships and medals. He had never connected these spectacular mementoes with the boastings in the Bromfield Sentinel, and their possible effect on certain of the old friends, whose children had not distinguished themselves. Providence, it now appeared, had been kind in the untimely taking off of his son. Such disgrace as Fournier Stone had brought upon his parents would be harder to bear. In David’s limited vocabulary respectability had no place. But principle loomed large. It was the thing Fournier Stone had done, not the newspaper account of it, that mattered.

X Eileen Seeks Counsel

I

Mrs. Ascott went out into the garden after breakfast to watch the transfer of tomato plants from the cold frames beside the garage to the loamy bed that bordered the west wall. Dutton had explained to her that nothing would thrive against the high board fence that shut the grounds from the street, at the east side of the garden--on account of the afternoon sun--and that these tomatoes would grow six feet high and would disport their fruit above the stone wall ... if the suckers were kept picked off. She wondered what suckers were, and how the afternoon sun had acquired such a sinister reputation.

She had not slept, and the April air was cool and refreshing. Mamma and the boys were safely installed in a Paris apartment. Papa had closed the big house at Pelham, taking two of the best trained servants with him to the city establishment on Riverside Drive, and was happily engrossed in the Wall Street fight for further millions--secure from the annoyance of family intrusion. She had several letters and one cablegram. How remote it all seemed, how like the hazy memory of another existence! Two months ago she was trying to forget Raoul, his amiable as well as his maddeningly offensive side. Now she seldom thought of him at all. His personality had lost its definite line and mass. Even his form was growing nebulous. She could not remember what it was that he particularly disliked for breakfast ... and whether he was growing alarmingly stout or thin when he went away to Egypt with Hilda Travers.

It was strange that she should have forgotten. Her life with him had been made up of just such things as these. She searched herself for an explanation, as the gardener rambled on, his words scarce reaching her consciousness. Slowly the imponderable thoughts assembled themselves, fashioning for her a shadow picture of her remote childhood. She was in the old kitchen at Rochester and her grandmother Holden was baking cookies for the slum children. There on the marble slab lay the great mass of yellow dough that so tempted her eager fingers. More than once she had seized a breathless opportunity, while grandma’s back was turned, to thrust an index finger far down into its golden softness. And behold! The mass had come together, leaving scarce a trace of the deep impression she had made.

Was she as plastic as dough, and had her husband gone from her life without leaving an impression? There must be something more ... something that had not worked out with precision in their case. Did not that same yielding substance take on the fairly permanent shapes of lions and camels, dancing girls and roosters with arching tails? Perhaps Raoul had neglected to bake the dough. Was she still an impressionable girl, for all her tragic experience?

II

The wicket gate opened and Eileen came towards her. The slim shoulders drooped carelessly and there was a sullen look about the too voluptuous mouth. Mrs. Ascott noticed for the first time that Eileen’s mouth was like her mother’s. All the rest of her was, as Theodora put it, “pure, unadulterated Trench” ... excepting, of course, the eyes, which were amber or vicious yellow, according to her mood. Lary had his father’s mouth; but had compromised with his mother on the question of eyes. Lavinia abhorred compromises, albeit she had learned to accept them as if they had been of her own choosing.

The girl stood in rebellious indecision, a few feet from the tomato bed. Then, as if she had made up her mind to do the thing ... and take the consequences, she came swiftly forward, put an arm around Judith’s waist and kissed her full on the mouth. It had been so long since any one had kissed her! The lips were speaking now, the tone low and vibrant with pleading.

“You don’t mind, do you? If you only knew how I adore you! I have sat at my window and watched you--and wondered about you--and wanted to kiss you, till my mouth ached.”

A thrill went through the woman’s usually tranquil body. Here was passion, susceptibility, imagination. She had not dreamed of such intensity in a girl so young. And this was the girl Larimore Trench had begged her to influence, to mould into some shape of his choosing--a shape that would be utterly displeasing to her mother.

“Can you come into the house with me? It’s only a little after eight. You won’t be late for chapel if you start at half-past.”

“I’m in no hurry. Hal’s coming by for me with the car. He’ll be on the campus five minutes before he started, if our old moth-eaten policeman happens to be looking the other way. I framed up the best looking excuse for a morning call ... and now I don’t need it. You invited me in--just like that! It’s always the way. If I have my gun loaded, there isn’t any bear.”

“Did you think you needed a pretext?”

“I couldn’t be sure. And with you ... it’s too important to take chances. I’ve been feeling my way, ever since you came. I can’t go dancing in, as Theo does. She is like mamma. You simply can’t snub that kid.”

The pretext was the revelation of the mystery-house across the way. Hal had told her all about it, after they left Ina and Kitten and their escorts. The owner of the carved dragon was Hal’s sister, Adelaide Nims. There had been a former marriage, about the time of Hal’s birth, a most unsavoury affair. Adelaide was seventeen at the time, and the reluctant husband was the divorced partner of one of Henry Marksley’s affinities. The Marksleys, père and mère, had been separated three times. Eileen and Hal agreed that it was indecent for people who despised each other to live together. Still, if his parents had not made up that last time, there would have been no Hal. This would have been calamity for Eileen.

The present Mrs. Nims was little known in Springdale, having lived abroad for almost twenty years. Her first husband, in Eileen’s piquant phrase, “had chucked her” after a few months--as a man usually does when he is dragooned into a distasteful marriage. There had been other marriages, “without benefit of clergy,” the details of which were suppressed in Springdale. Indeed coming to light only in connection with a divorce or two wherein Adelaide had figured as the reprehensible other woman. She had hair like polished mahogany and melting brown eyes, a skin like the petals of a Victoria Regia, at dawn of the morning after the lily’s opening, before the sun has tinged its creamy white with the faint rose that is destined to run the colour gamut to rich purplish red. She and Syd Schubert vied with each other in the number of instruments they could play; but she had made her great success with the ’cello, an instrument whose playing revealed to the best possible advantage the slim sensual grace of her body.

It was in a London music hall that Reginald Nims, younger son of a peer, had fallen beneath the weight of her manifold charms and had married her--to the dismay of his family. Eileen knew what she looked like. Not from Hal’s description, but because Springdale had seen her portrait. Just before she and her husband left England for China, they had sent it home for safe keeping ... the magnificent portrait that Sargent had painted. Mrs. Henderson gave a talk on it, in the reading room of the college library. Red hair, coppery in the high lights, eyes that would turn an anchorite from the path of duty, skin texture that was unsurpassed in the far reach of Sargent’s marvellous texture painting, a chiffon gown that reminded you of a cloud of flame-shot smoke, and a bit of still-life that was definitely, though not insistently, turquoise.

“Mrs. Henderson said that when she read a description of the picture, she supposed it was going to look like a Henner; but it was nothing of the sort. I had to go on the Q. T. to hear her talk. Of course you know, mamma belongs to the Art Study Club; but she was scandalized at Mrs. Henderson getting up there and talking about Adelaide Marksley. Lary tried to make her see that it was Sargent ... but what’s the use? You can’t get that kind of an idea into my mother’s head.”

The Browning Club had long since gone the way of Browning. But Mrs. Henderson, after the death of her husband, was constrained to seek new means of holding her grip on the social and intellectual leadership of the town. Fortunately Mrs. Clarkson, wife of the new Dean, was not aggressive. She was glad to be enrolled, along with Mrs. David Trench, as a member of the Art Study Club. Being a late comer in the town, she knew no reason why she should withdraw her moral support from the club, after its shocking display of the Sargent picture.

“But I hope the poor girl is at last happily married,” Mrs. Ascott hastened to say. She wondered if Eileen was always quite fair to her mother.

“That’s just what she isn’t. And thereby hangs the tale of their coming here to live for a couple of years. Hal said his father wanted to rent Vine Cottage for them--and in that case they wouldn’t have brought their furniture. But your Mr. Ramsay got ahead of him. I’m glad he did. But mamma would have turned them out, lease or no lease, if she ever got her eyes on an English paper published in Hong Kong, that Hal showed me, last night. It was the rippingest account you ever read, of Adelaide’s elopement with a member of the military band. It started in a sort of musical flirtation ... and ended in a miserable little hotel in Fu Chau. The writer said your sympathy would be with Mrs. Nims if you looked at the shape of Reginald Nims, and remembered that his wife was fond of dancing. Hal doesn’t know what that means--because he never saw his brother-in-law. He must be either a cripple or fat. It won’t be long till we know. They sail from Honolulu to-morrow.”

“Then she’s reconciled to her husband?”

“Had to be! She’s trying to make the best of a bad mess. The musician soured on his bargain....” The amber eyes flamed yellow. “Left her in the room at the hotel, and gave her husband the key. How did he know Nims wouldn’t kill her? I should think he would--if he had any spirit. They’re coming here till the scandal blows over and they can go back to London. Adelaide loathes China, and adores England. Hal said he guessed that Nims couldn’t bear to part with a wife who had red hair, even if he had to do the reversed Mormon stunt once in a while.”

Mrs. Ascott experienced a swift revulsion--not at the story Eileen was telling. She had heard many such. But in the bald discussion of sex encounters there lurked a definite element of danger. For another, and less serious reason, Hal Marksley ought not to be telling this story in Springdale, where his sister expected to live. But Eileen hastened to explain that she alone was in the secret, and she ... “was part of the family.”

“Really, my dear? I hadn’t suspected.”

“Yes, Lady Judith, and if you’ll let me, I’m coming back after school to tell you what I actually came to tell you this morning. May I? I’ll have to chase home and get my books. Hal’s honking for me, this minute.”

III

It was three o’clock when Eileen came home from school, tossed her things on the settee in the living-room and curled herself up contentedly on a hassock at Mrs. Ascott’s feet. Her cheeks were flushed and her low brow was framed in little caressing ringlets. She looked amazingly like Lary. Happiness fairly exuded from her being.

“I can’t beat around the bush, Lady Judith. When I have anything to say ... I have to go to it with both feet. Will you take care of this for me?”

She drew a shining gold chain from somewhere within the harbouring crispness of her piqué collar, wound the pliant links around her slender forefinger, and brought to light a ring set with a huge diamond. Hal had given it to her that morning. She had known about it for some time. The stone was one of many that belonged to his father ... and would never be missed. There was a good handful of them in a box in the office safe, and Adelaide would coax them all away from her father. He, Hal, might as well get his--while the getting was good. He had taken this one, and another for a scarf pin for himself, to St. Louis to be mounted the day after he and Eileen became engaged.

“You haven’t told your mother?” Mrs. Ascott interrupted.

“I can’t! I can’t! If you knew mamma better.... It would take all the sacredness--all the meaning out of it ... to have mamma preen herself because her daughter is going to marry the son of the richest man in town.”

“And your father, Eileen?”

The fair face went gray, and pain quivered the sensitive lips. “I can’t make that as clear as the other; but I’m the most unfortunate person in the world. You don’t know how I have dreamt of the time when I could go to my darling old daddy and hide my blushes in his shoulder, while I told him that the greatest thing in life had come to me. And now that it’s come ... he wouldn’t understand ... or approve. And mamma, who hasn’t a mortal bit of use for me, would take it as a personal triumph. Rush off to that silly little Bromfield Sentinel with an announcement of my engagement, and all about who the Marksleys are, and how much money they have. I just can’t give her that gratification. I’d choke.”

Sixteen! and she had life’s irony at her finger ends. The amber eyes filled with tears that glistened a moment on the long lashes and went trickling down the pale checks to make little welts on the stiffly starched piqué collar. Mrs. Ascott felt no impulse to smile. Here was a little hurt child, whose quivering lips might have been pleading for the life of a puppy condemned to be drowned. And it was all so deadly serious to her. Love? She might experience a dozen such heart-burnings before the dawning of the great passion.

“My dear, there is a touchstone given to each one of us, before we reach the years of discretion and judgment. Mine was my grandmother. Yours, I believe, is your father. I hid my engagement to Raoul Ascott from Grandma Holden. Only because I knew she would not approve. And, Eileen, my marriage turned out wretchedly. My husband was much older than I. And, do you know, dear, the immature mind is keenly flattered by the attention of the mature one. Hal is a college senior, almost five years older than you. If you could be sure your vanity isn’t involved--”